Capitalism unchecked evolves to monopoly. Capital is abstract value and competition for capital concentrates capital. Sympathetic wealthy corporatists desire power over government and a symbiotic government-capitalist relationship develops. Government passes laws in favor or concentrated wealth, unfettered capitalism and corporatism develops replacing democracy.
Corporatism as a global power association of the most wealthy plutocrats finds sycophantic government proxy rulers in any nation and form of government. Even Communist elites will find symbiotic stake holding in global corporate power.
Capitalism does not stop with global corporatism though. Corporatism is just another phase of the life cycle of capitalism on the way toward global monopoly.
Capitalism is not the same as free enterprise. Free enterprise requires capital for production, yet democracy can cap the concentration of wealth or capital produced with free enterprise and shifting some privately generated capital to public capital such as infrastructure and ecosphere reconstruction where it comprise a percent of all public capital including natural wilderness and water resources. Ecosphericly sympatico business and eco-zoning paradigmata may be promulgated.
Capitalism that is private seeks to redistribute public capital to private capital until no public capital exists or if tolerated comprises less than 1% of national capital.
Private capital in competition with private citizens too seeks to concentrate private capital in the most few who will in turn fight to the death to control the capital of all rivals until just one winner exists-as in the game of monopoly perhaps.
Private capital has no interest in externalities such as the environment that cannot turn a profit or bring in abstract capital. In fact because scarce resources are more valuable as capital sometimes, capitalist can profit even if global warming and mass extinction reduce all life on earth to just a few people who will pay great sums for oxygen to breathe or rare species to eat. Some day a trillionaire might sign over his half of the planet Earth for the chance to eat the last grass-fed cow.
Free enterprise and capitalism directed with enlightened democratic governments concerned with public well-being are the better utilization of world resources to produce inventions from more creative minds of benefit to humanity. Guaranteed minimum income of $6000 annually for instance, could keep seven young minority men from the desperation that causes them to commit crimes sometimes for a revenue stream, for the cost of sending just one young man to jail at an annual cost of $40,000. Free public education through college and a guaranteed minimum income along with the reduction of patent exclusivity to three years with just 10% royalties for patent holders thereafter would let every citizen have some confidence that they can find a way to use their creative mind productively during their lifetime and not be bogged down in repressive or inescapably oppressive economic-social currents.
With the environment being an externality to capitalists it is necessary to cap the percent of national income any individual pay own if public sector conservation and rehabilitation measures are to be effective. Presently conservationists may save a forest or wilderness reserve for a decade with substantial political work, yet that effort may be undone in just one session of Congress allowing exploitation or harvesting of that conserved natural wealth. Fundamentally conservation is a losing ecological gamble with the odds favoring ecosphere destruction. The way to give the edge to conservation is to shift national capital ratios as well as private capital distribution such that habitat conservation and rehabilitation are favored and democracy with free enterprise for all citizens pragmatically possible without the existence of the most extreme versions of capitalism leading to monopoly.
It may be too late though. Capitalism is blind to externalities, apparently as is the public.
